Marketing Management

Marketing Management Case Studies CASE STUDY (20 Marks) Eureka Forbes successfully introduced and sold for many years few models of vacuum cleaners through door–to door marketing. During the initial few years Eureka Forbes vacuum cleaners were not available at any dealer channel. These were sold only by direct marketing. Some experts attribute the success of Eureka Forbes to two factors: one, implementation of an effective sales management system & two, elimination of channel conflict by adopting only door to door selling even at a stage when durables were sold only through dealers.

Scene1 It has been a common experience that well advertised & well organized trade fairs generate huge sales. Experts believe that people visit such trade fairs with a frame of mind that is favorably predisposed to making purchase decisions. Deriving a cue from the trade fairs, way back in 1980, a small & upstart computer manufacturer arranged “Road Shows” in metros & mini metros. It was a period when foreign computer vendors were asked to leave India ; indigenous makes of computers were few ; perception of people about computers were – highly expensive, complex to use, needed trained manpower to operate that was scarce & performance of the hardware was unreliable. Those were the early days of computer marketing when there were no dealers & manufacturers had to sell through their own sales team.

Scene2 In the year 1999 Compaq Corp declared that its objective for the year is to become the Internet leader in the InfoTech industry. But for some strange reasons the rival company Dell took the lead in sale of PC’s over the Internet. They take just over three days to deliver a built to specs PC ordered via the net in the USA. Compaq, in the meanwhile, has behaved all muddled up in its Internet plan. The company made a tentative start, but recently announced that it has stopped selling its computers to internet only retailers worldwide. Such a move had a drastic effect on major players such as Siberian Outpost & Shopping.com, which derive much of their revenue from the sale of Compaq PC’s through their websites. On the other hand Compaq plans to purchase Shopping.com and merge it with the Alta Vista search engine on the net.

Answer the following question. Q1. Explain channel conflicts. What lesson do you learn about selection of channel from the above scenes? Q2. Compare the merits & demerits of selling by company’s own sales team, Dealer Channel & Direct Marketing?